CPU overload M1 chip on Big Sur Mac OS

[[email protected]]

Hi there anyone else found this problem?

So I have recently got a new 16gb M1 Mac mini with Ableton live 11, but the CPU is freaking out at around 80% in Ableton, even when the track is not playing its at 50%, and this is only on 48,000SR 24bit. The Ableton CPU percentage in activity monitor is hovering at about 150% all the time just being open.

I am also running the [very] new Mac OS Big Sur, so I'm guessing it may be a case of Ableton tech just having to get used to the new systems? What I don't get is how it can take 150% CPU when not even playing?! Hopefully a smarter tech head than me can advise!

Many thanks,
Sean

[Mark Williams]

My m1 mini shows only 2% idle, maybe you have other apps running as well. Or plugin causing that

[Greenapples2019]

Hi, did you start the project on another machine and are now opening it on your new M1? I had a similar problem when I got my M1 and it was one of the instrument racks on an imported project causing the high CPU. I found the rack by gradually deleting tracks until CPU suddenly dropped from 80+% to 10%. Then recreated the rack and everything was fine. But that was on Live 10 so not sure if it's Live 11 that's causing the problem.

Cheers

D

[Tarekith]

Keep in mind that M1 Macs aren’t officially supported by Live yet too.

[lovelight]

I hope they will fix this soon. Bitwig is ready for the M1 and of cause Logic Pro. But I imagine its not a small task to do this.

[[email protected]]

Hi, did you start the project on another machine and are now opening it on your new M1? I had a similar problem when I got my M1 and it was one of the instrument racks on an imported project causing the high CPU. I found the rack by gradually deleting tracks until CPU suddenly dropped from 80+% to 10%. Then recreated the rack and everything was fine. But that was on Live 10 so not sure if it's Live 11 that's causing the problem.

Cheers

D

Hi Greenapples, no its a project I started on the new machine. It does have some complex channels in there but my old machine could go up to 200 easily. I have 50% less RAM this time at 16gb but still struggling with quite simple tracks too, that's why id assume its a coding thing with the new chip.

Might also be because the project Im working from is on an external drive, though it is SSD usb-c

[svennirusl]

Hi, did you start the project on another machine and are now opening it on your new M1? I had a similar problem when I got my M1 and it was one of the instrument racks on an imported project causing the high CPU. I found the rack by gradually deleting tracks until CPU suddenly dropped from 80+% to 10%. Then recreated the rack and everything was fine. But that was on Live 10 so not sure if it's Live 11 that's causing the problem.

Cheers

D

Were these any particular devices, or was the bloat just inside racks? So you could have deleted a rack and recreated it, and gotten rid of the bloat that way?

[Greenapples2019]

Mine was just a bog standard drum rack with 16 samples in it. Nothing special about it, and other racks were fine, but as soon as I deleted that one the CPU was fine. Project ran about 40% on my old MBP, went up to 80%+ on my M1 and then down to 18% when I deleted the rack.

[lovelight]

U-he just got ready for the M1…This is just my personal opinion but it would be great if Ableton could say something about when we could expect Live would be working natively with the M1, otherwise people would begin to use other Daw,s for speed and less CPU eating of your Mac M1…

[ToneShop]

U-he just got ready for the M1…This is just my personal opinion but it would be great if Ableton could say something about when we could expect Live would be working natively with the M1, otherwise people would begin to use other Daw,s for speed and less CPU eating of your Mac M1…

I did exactly that , returned to Bitwig for the native M1 support.

[Pasha]

I think Live during the years embedded a lot of third party code. Thing as FX, Instruments, M4L. Keeping your lifecycle in sync it's very hard when it doesn't belong entirely on your company. Maybe they should release an M1 Native version without the third party stuff while catching up. Much better than giving the impression that the goal is far in the future. Alternatively expose a roadmap. Max 8.1.11 is not M1 Native yet AFAIK.

[[email protected]]

Thanks for the help all, have bounced and simplified all I can, but production is very, VERY slow.

[lovelight]

Indeed, just tried Logic Pro together with U-he synth, its really smooth and fast, but the DAW is nothing I will use, Live is much better despite this new problem (M1 and Sur is from November 2020)

[marbles]

Old thread but I wanted to reply since I was having a similar problem with my m1 iMac running Monterey. The CPU load meter never got above 15% on my ancient iMac and was instantly 20% (up to 60) on my m1 iMac. Separate from this, I realized that Live 11's recording buffer was set to 512 samples by default.. dropping it to the minimum (32 samples) got the load meter down to 1%.

The mystery is why latency would correlate with CPU load in the opposite way that it used to, but regardless it solved my problem.

[Greenapples2019]

Hi marbles, it's worth experimenting even more with the buffer size - on my M1 the sweet spot is 128, gives me the lowest CPU usage of any buffer size and latency is only a bit greater than 32/64.